A large and growing population of people enjoys entertainment or digital media through consumption of digital content items, such as music, movies, books, games and other types of digital content. Electronic distribution of information has gained in importance with the proliferation of personal computers, mobile devices and mobile phones, and electronic distribution has undergone a tremendous upsurge in popularity as the Internet has become widely available. With the widespread use of the Internet, it has become possible to quickly and inexpensively distribute large units of information using electronic technologies.
The rapid growth in the amount of digital media available provides enormous potential for users to find content of interest. Consumers often enjoy listening to music. In recent years, much of the music listened to by consumers has been digitized and is either streamed or downloaded to a media playback device. The media playback device may be portable, such as a smartphone, tablet, MP3 player or the like, but could be any of a variety of other devices, such as personal computers, stereo systems, televisions and so forth.
While listening to music, some consumers may wish to sing along with the music or to see the lyrics associated with the music. Many of the devices used for playback of music include a display that may be used for navigation and selection of music tracks and so forth. In some cases, lyrics associated with the music are provided on the display of the device. For karaoke type songs, the lyrics are synchronized with the music to display the lyrics for a particular portion of the song when that portion of the song is being played back by the device. During playback, lyrics may be synchronously displayed on the device, such that consumers may see the lyrics and follow along or may sing along with the lyrics as desired. However, the process of synchronizing lyrics to music for these songs is time intensive and involves significant manual effort to identify which lyric(s) should appear during playback of a particular part of the song. As a result, lyrics are often simply made available to consumers without synchronization with music.